


love, I feel it's time to fall

by openhearts



Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-02-01 00:08:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21291686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openhearts/pseuds/openhearts
Summary: Somewhere along the way, Ellacott’s Arrangements becomes Strike’s favorite place to be
Relationships: Robin Ellacott & Cormoran Strike
Comments: 36
Kudos: 85





	love, I feel it's time to fall

**Author's Note:**

> Title and headings from Change it All by Harrison Storm
> 
> This is more a flower shop fusion than a full AU, and the canon present is a blend of book and show, with full divergence coming in at the end. I probably futzed with the timelines more than anything else as this whole fic takes place over six or so months but still covers events from Cuckoo’s Calling through Career of Evil, but ends before any of the events of Lethal White.

Part One

_ It’s hard to find peace _

_ Buried in so deep _

_ I can only hear the world is shouting _

Change it All - Harrison Storm

  
  


He follows her a few blocks and then around one corner before his knee threatens to give out. The walk - brisk though it’s been - isn’t the problem so much as dodging projectiles and then running down the metal staircase. 

She’s disappearing into the foot traffic on the sidewalk now, but Strike has tailed enough people over the years to know when a mark is aware of him. No matter her play acting to the contrary, he knew she was always hyper-aware of him. She’s waiting, even as she’s walking away.

Strike stops, knee throbbing, lip smarting, breath heaving. He sees himself as if from a distance: sweaty, lumbering, suffering after Charlotte again.

Again.

He staggers back, nearly taking out a young mother with a fat ginger baby in her arms and mutters an apology, until he can lean against the building at his right. He loses Charlotte in the crowd for a split second and uses that time to tear his gaze away, closing his eyes to stop himself searching for her again. He tugs his cigarettes from his pocket and lights one, the first inhale clouding his lungs with a welcome distraction. Slowly his center of gravity seems to settle again as he repeats the familiar rhythm of inhale, exhale, flick away ash.

When he gets to the end of the cigarette he stubs it out and looks around. The sun is breaking through the clouds, golden bright and mocking the overturned state of his insides. He might as well have just limped away from a fiery car wreck for how beaten and shocked he feels, reeling with every step he can imagine Charlotte takes, wherever she is. Still he glances to his left and right at the signs in the shop windows - a chip shop to one side and on the other a wide window beside a nine-pane door painted spring green.

_ Ellacott’s Arrangements _ is painted on the window in the same green as the door with some white and gold flourishy bits around. Through the glass he can see flowers in vases, pots, and formed into wreaths.

Cormoran Strike has never felt he’s a particularly mean person. Taciturn, grumpy, surly-faced, he’ll own up to. He’ll use those to his advantage too, pulling a dark glaring cloud around him when convenient. But he’s not cruel, never much tries to go out of his way to hurt people. Unless they deserve it. But at this moment . . . the sun blinds him cheerily. A familiar Charlotte-shaped pain drags his heart down through his guts with every breath. He’s twenty again, reeling after a particularly nasty fight - one that would continue to repeat for years to come. He takes a resigned accounting of what remains of the last sixteen years of his life - nil. 

At this moment, Strike feels like being cruel.

He pushes into Ellacott’s Arrangements through its cheery green door, grimacing at the racket of the bell upset by its swing. The place is small but airy with faded cream walls and a terra cotta tile floor. A deep counter stretches across half the width of the place, another door standing ajar behind it, this one painted rose red.

“Be out in a tick!” a feminine voice rings out.

Strike stands, surveying the chipped painted wood counter where a sheaf of papers covered in sketches sits beside a mug with a collection of drawing pencils inside.

“Hello, how can I help you?”

The woman who appears through the red door is young, not just in years - though she’s that too - but fresh faced and healthy and  _ bright _ . Strike would like to leave immediately. He stays silent for a beat too long.

“Hello?” she asks again, tilting her head. She fiddles with the collar of her soft button down shirt, tugging it free from the strap of a canvas apron she’s got on over her clothes.

“Sorry, right. I need some flowers.”

“Yes?” Her wide blue eyes - rather excessively blue, he thinks, since he can see their color from clear across the shop - give a little roll about the space.

“Right,” Strike repeats. The woman indicates a stool on his side of the counter and he takes a few awkwardly fast strides and drops his weight on it. “Uh, I need some flowers for my-” ex? Is she? He’s suddenly stabbed in the chest with it all over again. “For my-”

“Oh, you have um-” she points, indicating his bloody lip. The bright smile has vanished but not the bright  _ brightness _ about her.

Strike rolls his eyes and brushes at his mouth roughly, then winces. The woman offers him a tissue warily. He drops his elbows on the counter and dabs at his swelling lip. After a moment she ventures,

“Do you need an apology bouquet, perhaps?”

“Apolo- I haven’t got  _ shit _ to apologize for, she threw an ashtray at my face.”

The woman’s eyes go wide and she visibly recoils at the venom in his voice, but there’s something sly on her face when she says, after a pause,

“So, more of a . . . good riddance bouquet then?”

“D’you have something stronger than that? Like a  _ fuck off forever _ arrangement.”

She snorts, slaps a hand over her mouth and eyes him over it for a moment before nodding her head from side to side, considering. A lock of strawberry blonde hair escapes the loose twist at the back of her head and falls over her brow. She tucks it behind her ear and purses her lips, eyeing him. Then she pulls up her own stool on the other side of the counter. She’s close enough that it suddenly feels rather conspiratorial when her voice goes a bit hushed.

“I think the way to go about this is for me to make a bouquet and you may hand-write your own card, not on my stationary, and take care of your own delivery. You know, just for . . . public relations reasons.”

Strike appraises her again. The glimmer of mischief in her blue eyes is a little icy alongside the general glow about her. There’s barely a hint of crinkling at the corners of her eyes when she squints at him with a quirked mouth.

“What d’you think?”

“Sounds good,” Strike agrees. Impossibly he feels a tug upward at his mouth. “Sorry for uh-” he indicates vaguely with one hand, “it’s all a bit fresh.”

“Well you’re still bleeding so,” she shrugs, “figured that.” She seems amused by him which is embarrassing. But it’s better than pity. “Would you like some tea? I’d just turned on the kettle when you came in.”

“Yeah, alright.”

“Good, I’ll just-” she indicates the red door, but first pulls a thick binder from below the counter and thumps it down before him. “Have a look at that, see what jumps out at you.”

Strike obediently opens the book, revealing torn out magazine and catalogue pictures slid into plastic sheet protectors and some photo prints of what must be examples of Ellacott’s former work. 

“How d’you take it?” she calls from the back room.

“Black, thanks.”

Knowing not the first thing about flowers, Strike flips aimlessly to pass the time until the woman - who he assumes is Ellacott herself - returns with two steaming mugs.

“There we are,” she sets his down before him. “See anything you like?”

Strike blinks down at the book and hides his lack of an opinion behind a long sip of tea. When he casts his eyes to the glossy pictures again they swim before his eyes. 

Why is he here? How was sending flowers with a nasty note to Charlotte meant to keep them broken up? What vindication could he hope to derive from Charlotte’s reaction? What words would he really want to commit to paper that could hurt her enough to keep them apart?

In sixteen years they’d both said some pretty awful things to each other - not that it was a competition but she took the prize for that easily. Strike was more prone to silence as a weapon. So wouldn’t flowers delivered with a screed of insults somehow be more fitting of Charlotte herself and her theatrical tantrums?

Strike sits, adrift.

His knee aches. The mug is warm on his palm.

She’s waiting, the flower woman. Strike catches her eye, feeling vaguely sheepish, humiliation creeping warm fingers up his neck.

“Thinking better of it then?” she asks gently.

He sighs, and his chest feels no looser for it.

“‘S a bit childish I suppose?”

She shrugs benevolently, still allowing it to go either way, perhaps trying to keep open her option to make a sale yet.

“No, no,” Strike says eventually, deciding with a blustery sigh. “I apologize for wasting your time but I am thinking better of it. No fuck you flowers today.”

Her smile grows, impossibly fond to be directed at a stranger with a bloody lip who keeps swearing at her.

“That seems wise,” she agrees. 

She leaves the book open between them but picks up her own mug of milky tea to her lips, leaving a tacit invitation for Strike to do the same.

“Do you get many people in for fuck you flowers?” he asks belatedly.

“You are in fact the first. But I’ve only just opened last month, so. Maybe I can add it to the window sign.”

“Corner that market, yeah, get in early,” he agrees. 

He’s grinning now, performing an ease he doesn’t really feel. But it’s a relief even to pretend after the last few weeks. They each sip their tea and catch one another in a brief stare over the tops of their cups. Strike blinks away when his phone vibrates with a text.

“Well.” he sets his empty mug down and sets to heaving himself to his feet in such a way as to not appear that it takes much heaving at all. “Thank you for the tea. Good luck with the business.”

She rises from her stool as well and sticks out a hand just as Strike is about to turn and escape. “I’m Robin by the way,” she says. The grip of her slim hand is surprisingly firm.

“Cormoran.”

“Nice to meet you. And good luck with . . . well-”

“An end long overdue,” he finishes for her, dropping her hand. He clears his throat as if he could take back the strangely intimate revelation. Robin nods politely and goes to gather their mugs.

“Hey Cormoran,” she adds when he’s at the green door again, “feel free to come back again for any kind of flowers, yeah?”

He smiles, not a grin this time but something that feels sad and pitiful on his tired face. He gives a little wave and leaves to the tinkling of the bell.

_

  
  


“Hello, how can I- oh it’s you!” Strike eyes her warily - Robin, of Ellacott’s Arrangements, who remembers him. “ _ Fuck you _ flowers, right?”

“You’ve got a good memory,” Strike observes, easing himself down onto the stool and folding his hands on the counter.

Robin taps her temple with a finger, “Good for business. Helps to get to know my regulars.”

“Oh I’m a regular now?” Strike raises his eyebrows.

“Twice in a month,” Robin says, shrugging, smiling, eyeing him. “So what’s it today then? Some  _ wish you weren’t here _ hibiscus?  _ Sod off _ chrysanthemums?”

Strike pauses, face pulled down. “I need a small arrangement for a funeral."

“Oh,” Robin says softly. “I’m so sorry, of course.”

“S’okay,” Strike adds. “I wasn’t close to her.” 

He pauses, fidgeting his folded hands on the countertop. He scrubs his palms together too hard and winces, sucking in a breath through his teeth. They’re still bright red from plunging them into that scalding hot bath to haul out Rochelle Onifade’s body. 

“Bloody hell, your hands! Are you alright, you want some ice or something?”

“It’s fine, it’s fine, just-” he gestures, waving the interruption away. He sighs and considers a moment before finishing, “I’m a private investigator, she was involved in a case I’m working on, and she was murdered.”

“Jesus,” Robin murmurs. She places the big binder from before on the counter, facing it to herself this time. “Well,” she says, before taking a deep breath in and out. “Alright then. The deceased’s first name? If that’s - if you can share that I mean.”

“Rochelle,” he answers, tilting his head a bit to try to read her writing upside down.

Robin begins scratching notes on a piece of scrap paper from the familiar stack that sits beside the mug full of pencils.

“And you said a small arrangement, are you thinking a wreath, or something in a container?”

“Small, ah, simple, I suppose. I doubt there’ll be many people there besides me, her aunt, and the D.I. to be honest with you. Maybe someone from the housing where she was living.”

“That sounds like a sad life,” Robin says softly.

“She seemed sad when I met her. If I hadn’t-” he cuts off, and avoids Robin’s eyes when they flick up.

The silence sits for a moment between them, Robin’s pencil still and the noise of the street muffled on the other side of the wide front window pane. 

“Right, well,” Robin clears her throat and opens the binder, retreating into a more business like tone. “White is traditional for a funeral. Lilies, carnations, roses, gladiolus.” She flips through to a few pages of wreaths and vase arrangements, seas of white blooms with bits of deep greenery peeking through. “Or something more colorful, but that really depends on the person, what they were like.”

Strike shrugs. Except the differing basic shapes of wreaths versus bouquets, it all looks the same to him. But that’s not something you say to a florist, he supposes. “I really don’t know-” 

“Something like this, maybe?” she points to a smaller bundle in a simple glass vase. 

Strike recognizes roses and a few lilies sprinkled through what must be the cheaper blooms. “Sure, yeah, that’ll be fine.”

“And when d’you need them?”

“Oh, it’s tomorrow afternoon, will that be alright?”

“I’ve got my delivery guy booked through the morning but I should be able to add in another stop. Where’s it held?”

He gives her the address and time and Robin pauses, pursing her lips. She pulls out another binder and flips it open to a calendar with times and locations penciled in. “That’s okay I can just bring them in myself,” she decides, under her breath.

She puts a few more notes down on her scrap paper with Rochelle’s name and plucks the picture from the binder. As she’s holding the page up something catches Strike’s eye. It’s another small arrangement with white flowers, but this time with bright reds mixed in.

“Wait,” he says, pulling the book toward him and planting a finger on the picture. “Could you make it more like this, except with pink?”

“Sure, what kind of pink?”

“Bright, very bright, a bit purplish-”

Robin produces another binder and flips through a rainbow of pages, stopping and placing her own finger on another picture of a mass of flowers in the same blinding pink as the coat Rochelle had been wearing when Strike met her.

“Yes,” he points to it, taken aback. “Exactly that. I didn’t realize that color occurs in nature to tell you the truth.”

Robin smiles. “Fuschia. That’s the color, and this,” she points to another picture, an intricate multipart bloom of thin sparse petals bowing out from a central cluster of rounder petals with a long stamen protruding from the center, “is the flowering shrub called fuschia. These are a bit tricky in our climate but I can get them if it’s the flowers you’re after. If the color is more important I can do it with carnations mixed in with pure white roses, and then tiger lilies with petals spotted in purpley reds to tie it all together?”

Strike nods dumbly, now watching Robin’s clear eyed look and the satisfied, determined curve of her mouth. She nods once and Strike returns it.

“I’ll see you tomorrow then,” she adds, plucking out the pictures and adding them to her notes.

The bell tinkles on Strike’s way out. It’s a sweeter, more melodious chime than he remembers from his first visit to Ellacott’s Arrangements.

_

  
  


“Sir,” Robin says over the tinkling of the bell. She glances past the man hunched over a binder at the counter to catch Strike’s eye and gives him a wry little smile with widened eyes. He grins back. She continues, “if she’s allergic to pollen I really wouldn’t recommend daisies. We can use daffodils, those are a bit better for allergies and the colors are perfect-”

“But her name’s Daisy!”

Strike snorts and covers it with a cough. 

“Well,” Robin’s holding back her own laughter, her voice shaking a bit with the effort. She clears her throat surreptitiously, “Excuse me, sorry, if you’re set on daisies I could order in silks. I have a supplier who does gorgeous ones-”

“But couldn’t you use real daisies and just scrape the pollen out or something?”

Robin purses her lips and smiles purposefully. “That’s not- no, I’m sorry I couldn’t. Here,” she gently dislodges the binder from his hands and exchanges it for another from under the counter, “These are all a bit easier on allergies. I really wouldn’t feel right doing a bouquet that could endanger anyone’s health. Excuse me please, I’d like to help this gentleman while you have a look.”

She withdraws smoothly and approaches Strike, where he’d been loitering at the window display. She crosses her arms as she steps out from behind the counter, her canvas apron over jeans and another button-down stained green and yellow in places. Strike gestures to the smudges and stains and asks sotto voice, “pollen?”

Robin looks down and snorts, her own voice quiet to match, “I should never meet poor Daisy or she’ll go into anaphylaxis.”

They both contain their laughs and Robin glances over her shoulder at Daisy’s Boyfriend. “What’cha in for then?”

“Ah, anything really. I need a bouquet of something to reenact a crime.”

“A crime? With  _ flowers _ ?”

Strike can’t resist. “Smothered under scads of daisies, yeah. Poor thing suffocated from the pollen. Real sick fu-”

“Shut up,” Robin cuts him off with a light smack to his arm, still laughing when she mutters, “you’re a right terror, aren’t you?”

Strike shrugs amiably. “Someone delivered a couple of dozen white roses to one flat, but there were dried petals on a table in another flat in the same building where the crime took place and no flower deliveries there according to the doorman. I really could use the flowers for when I walk through the scene, helps to have everything as accurate as possible.”

“Excuse me?” Daisy’s Boyfriend asks from the counter, and Robin hurries over.

Strike goes back to loitering, perusing the armloads of blooms arranged to face the window front. Something brushes his temple and he smacks it away before realizing it’s a tendril of ivy trailing from a hanging basket above his head. He tosses a glance back at Robin and sees her head bowed, marking an order down on her calendar. In another few moments her customer is leaving and Strike sidles up to the counter, taking his place on the stool.

“What’d he end up with?”

Robin leans on her elbows and points to each flower in the pictures she has pinned to her notes, “Daffodils, tulips, hydrangea.”

“Nice.”

“Oh they’re going to be beautiful. Certainly better than sending poor Daisy to hospital with the fifty daisies he came in for.” She sighs and sets the sheaf of paper and photos aside, pausing for a moment before she asks, “Are you in a hurry, or would you like some tea? I was just about to-”

“Uh yeah, sure, if you were-” “-have some myself, okay, sure.”

They talk over each other and both pause, smiling. “Okay,” Robin finishes, and turns, untying her apron strings as she disappears behind the rose-red door into the back room.

Strike drums his fingers on the counter top restlessly.

“Does it matter what kind?” Robin asks a few moments later, two mugs of tea in her hands.

“Does it what? Sorry-”

“Oh, the bouquet, for the crime scene. Do you need white roses? Y’know for  _ accuracy _ ?” 

She’s lifting her mug to her lips and Strike is suddenly blinded by the large oval sapphire on her left ring finger. He draws up short for a long moment, covering it with a sip of his own tea. It’s dark as burnt toast just as he likes. He hadn’t noticed the ring last time, he’s sure.

“Ah, cheap? Cheap would be good,” he says finally. Then, with a touch of self-loathing - she’s  _ engaged _ , not that he’d been planning something; his night with Ciara had been memorable to say the least - “did you remember how I like my tea, or-?”

“Regular,” Robin says simply with a wink.

Strike’s stomach flops inconveniently.

After their tea she goes to a row of glass-fronted coolers and pulls out a tissue-wrapped bouquet of cartoonishly cheery flowers in all different shades of pink.

“These were from a call-in order by a woman who was  _ exceedingly _ rude, and was due to pick them up,” Robin glances a clock on the wall beside a corkboard pinned with drawings and pictures, “twenty hours ago, but she hasn’t called. Would these be up to snuff for a crime scene, d’you think?”

Strike eyes the flowers appraisingly.

“All depends, are they hypoallergenic?”

Robin rolls her eyes and thrusts the bouquet at him. “No charge. Thank Ms. Rude-and-Late.”

“Y’know I’m not sure you can call me a regular if I’ve only paid for flowers once.”

“I’ll call whoever I like a regular, thank you.”

He pauses, standing with the flowers in one hand. “Thank you for these Robin.” He plucks out one that looks something like a miniature pastel pink sunflower and holds it out to her. She laughs brightly and takes it.

“Til next time then.” He waves a little awkwardly and makes his way out.

_ Engaged _ , he mutters to himself with a sigh as he begins to make his way to the tube for Kentigern Gardens.  _ As if it matters that a young pretty shop owner who knows how to drum up business for herself is engaged or not. _

He can’t bring himself to dump the flowers in a trash bin after his visit to Lula Landry’s flat. They’d be ridiculous at the office. Taking them back to Robin’s seems strange - they’re already starting to look a bit worse for wear from his walk over and back and one or two instances of being dumped unceremoniously when he’d had a sudden thought as he walked through the building.

He settles for leaving the bright pink bundle on an empty bench outside a cemetery on his walk back to Denmark Street. Maybe someone will pick them up and bestow them on a grave. He tries not to wonder too much whether Robin would approve of this or not - he thinks she would.

_

  
  


“Y’know what the problem is, Robin-”

Robin cuts Strike off with a scream, scrabbling at the green door of Ellacott’s Arrangements which she had just finished locking when Strike trundled up behind her in the dark, unannounced and completely pissed.

“Oh my god, Cormoran,” she gasps, hands to her chest and plastered against the door now, facing him. He sways, squinting. 

“Robin ‘m very sorry I seem to’ve been unin-spected.”

“No it’s alright,” she says, slowly peeling herself off the door. In the dark her eyes glitter with unshed tears. She smoothes her hands over her coat a few times. “What are you doing out then, are you-” she eyes him, pauses, and continues delicately, “have you had anything to eat?”

“Eat? No, no, I got a phone call.” _ Soon to be Mrs. Jago Ross. _

“You got a phone call?”

“Yeah.”

“. . . Okay. Well. Let’s go get some chips, yeah?”

She steers him carefully by one arm toward the chip shop next door. Once they have their orders and are settled in one of the two small booths set against the bright orange painted walls, Strike, mouth full, asks suddenly,

“How much’re chips now? Here, here,” he gathers up whatever he can find from his coat pocket and spills it out onto the little table: wallet, packets of cigarettes and matches, spare coins, a few false IDs, and crumpled receipts. “‘S’ere enough for half of chips you reckon?”

“Are all men’s coat pockets that deep?” Robin asks, betrayed, as she surveys the pile of contents.

“I’ve never measured,” he intones, then snorts at himself.

Robin raises an eyebrow and picks up a few of the IDs and badges, her brow furrowing as she inspects them. 

“Michael Dunleavy, Workplace Inspector?”

“Tools of the trade. Y’know Robin if you flash a badge and say a lot of words you can just walk in most places, people don’t pay a lick of attention.”

Robin hums knowingly and lays the cards down again. “Don’t worry about the chips, they’re my treat.”

“Noooo, you’ve got to save your flowers for money,” Strike objects, but tucks back into his chips immediately anyway. They eat in companionable silence for a few minutes until Strike looks up again suddenly.

“You know what’s the problem today, Robin?”

She smiles around a bite.

“I don’t, will you tell me?” 

“Digitalization.”

“Huh.” She mulls this over while Strike continues, oblivious.

“Love letters! What’s happened to love letters? And-”

“You know I agree with you,” she interrupts.

“Of course you do, it’s very-”

“Because I’ve been trying to collect used paper from the businesses around, this chip shop included, and you know hardly anyone keeps paper about anymore? Everything’s online and in computers. They have receipt paper, if that, and that’s worthless for handmade floral paper.”

“Handmadefloralpapers,” Strike repeats, slurred.

“Yeah, I’d like to make it for the wedding invitations, y’know? Maybe even carry it in the shop, I could have greeting cards printed up on it, use it to send with the deliveries, all that.”

“You’ve got vision,” Strike says definitively, to his chips. He licks sauce from his fingers.

“I have,” she says ruefully, swirling one of her own through a glob of sauce. “You might be the only one who thinks that, Cormoran.”

He mm’s around a mouthful.

“There’s so many things I want to do with the shop,” Robin continues. “The paper, and framed pressed flowers, candles, teas, even my own pottery. And I could, once it’s established, maybe if I just get a few big jobs to really get going. The tenant above has been there for years and years, but she’s got to be getting too old to manage the stairs so I think her kids’ll move her out fairly soon. And then . . .”

“You’ll live above the shop,” Strike finishes, swallowing and nodding along.

“Exactly!” Robin says, gesturing with a chip before eating it. Around it, she adds, “Y’know you’re very easy to talk to, is that odd?”

“It’s one of my qualities,” Strike agrees serenely. He wipes sauce from his chin with a flourish.

Robin sighs. “Living above the shop would be lovely, I think. If Matthew didn’t absolutely hate the idea.” She laughs humorlessly.

“Matthew.”

“Oh,” she raises her left hand and flashes the ring a bit, “yeah I guess I never said, I’m engaged.”

Strike mm’s again, raising his eyebrows in recognition belatedly. There’s an extended pause as a pair of teenage girls come into the shop, place their orders, and giggle over whatever they’re showing each other on their phone screens.

“He doesn’t want to live above the shop?” Strike asks in the lull after the two girls leave with their chips. He can feel his buzz both ebbing away and carrying him on down this line of questioning to which he really doesn’t want answers.

“Ah, Matthew would rather have sold it off straight away.  _ It’s nice for a hobby but be realistic _ ,” she parrots.

“But you’ve got  _ a shop _ ,” Strike argues, disgruntled on Robin’s behalf.

Robin sighs deeply but waves the topic away, chip held in her fingers, before taking a bite. “Are you feeling better?” she asks instead.

“ _ Better, _ ” Strike scoffs, “Right as rain, me.”

“Good,” she answers, smiling. “Will you walk me to the tube?”

“Sure, is it far from Denmark street though, because that’s where I live and my-” he stops abruptly as he struggles up from the bench, swallowing down a wince when he twists his knee wrong and the leg shifts painfully on his stump. 

Robin’s turned away wiping her hands and tossing her napkins in the bin. Strike snags his container of chips, taking a shaky limp on his first step, and then Robin’s beside him again, tipping the rest of her own chips into his container. Her face betrays nothing in the strange glow of the fluorescents off the orange walls.

“Cheers,” he murmurs, raising the container a little. 

He allows her to hold open the door for him and out they go into the night. He immediately stumbles over a ridge in the sidewalk and Robin hurries to steady him and they continue on arm-in-arm. Strike wills himself to be drunker, wills away the repeated replay of Charlotte’s voice in his head -  _ Mrs. Jago Ross _ \- wills away the lingering vision of a blinding sapphire that hangs in his vision like a hallucination.

He’s got to dig his keys out eventually but he’s loathe to dislodge Robin’s arm from the crook of his, masochist that he is. As such, he mumbles around another mouthful of chips, 

“Robin Ellacott’s Arrangements, what're you doing walking a strange bear home? Man of a bear? Bear of a man."

Robin laughs outright, a throaty cackling thing that doesn’t sound like he expected in the best way. She quiets quickly, slowing her steps when he does his. They stand facing the guitar shop window and she slips her arm from his.

"Well it's on my way to the tube. And . . . I've got a sense about people,” Robin says softly, “and I don't believe you'd ever hurt me, Cormoran Strike."

"You'd be right about that."

He forgets his keys until Robin nudges him gently and he obeys, fishing them out of his pocket. Robin holds the chips while he unlocks the door.

“Will you be alright?” she asks.

Strike shrugs. It’d be nice if there were something rakishly off-hand to say here but really he’s just sad. She holds out the chips graciously and backs away a step, then another.

“See you around then.”

“Hey, be careful,” he calls after her, and she waves before sticking both hands in her pockets and quickening her stride, her head on a swivel as she disappears into the night.

“Please be careful,” he mutters again. 

He lets the door shut out the night behind him.

_

  
  


Part Two

_ Heard a whisper _

_ Something said so sweet _

_ Now quiet as ever, we'll leave this scene _

Change it All - Harrison Storm

The spring green door of Ellacott’s Arrangements is beginning to trigger a warmth in Strike’s chest. Inconveniently. He’s inside before he quite realizes that he doesn’t actually have a reason to be there other than to apologize for accosting Robin while he was drunk. He’s fuzzy on the finer points but he does remember bits, some of them rather embarrassing for himself. He hopes having no contact for the last few weeks will have smoothed over any awkwardness caused by his pissed-edness. Business has picked up in the wake of the resolution of Lula Landry’s case, the headlines bringing him more clients, though none who’ve ended up dead or have any other use for flowers. Ciara Porter certainly isn’t expecting any which suits Strike just fine.

Robin’s not behind the counter when Strike walks in, muddled as he is in his own thoughts and Strike stares, confused, startling at a whispered “psst,” from his left.

Robin stands at the window, a few armloads of blooms held to her chest, smiling her familiar bright smile.

"Hello again, strange bear."

Strike raises an eyebrow in greeting and cringes at another fuzzy memory brought to the forefront since the last time he'd seen Robin.  _ Bear of a man _ .

“Cheers for that, I needed a jolt of panic and shame to wake me up.”

“Special services for regulars, you know,” Robin replies, clearing her throat and turning quickly toward the counter. 

He thinks he catches a blush over her cheeks and neck at what must have been the unintended implication but he lets it pass without comment and follows her over to the counter where there’s a work in progress, he guesses, in a squat globe of hobnailed milk glass.

“Sorry, about-”

"You were fine,” Robin waves off his apology. “I've met  _ much _ worse drunks."

"Okay Miss Ellacott," Strike says, teasingly impressed.

Robin gives him a pursed-lipped grin through her lashes as she sets down bundles of lavender and baby's breath between them on the counter.

“What’s this then?” he asks, settling down on the stool.

He recognizes peach roses sprinkled with tiny white pearl-centered flowers, and what looks like the same kind of ivy that spills over its hanging basket above the front window.

“Anniversary," she answers distractedly before looking up again. "Tea?”

“Sure.”

Robin smiles and disappears into the office. She’s gone for a bit, and Strike’s just feeling in his pockets for his mobile when he remembers the manuscript of Bombyx Mori from the Quine’s residence and pulls it out instead. He’s mulling over it, skimming the first page through Orlando Quine’s bright marker drawings all over the front when Robin comes back with the tea.

“Are you bringing me sketches to replicate now?” she asks. She pulls up her own stool and sits to sip her tea, eyeing the manuscript upside down.

“No, it’s for a case. Writer’s disappeared, his wife’s looking for him.” Strike indicates the drawings, noticing for the first time they’re mostly flowers, many with faces drawn on the centers. “He has a daughter who likes to draw.”

Robin leans over and smiles, tracing one of the crudely-formed red petaled ones with a frowning face and more than one stem. “This could be a gerbera daisy, the red ones always look rather short tempered to me.”

Strike huffs a laugh at that. “Have you read anything by Owen Quine?”

“Don’t think so, is he any good?”

“Well according to everyone I’ve interviewed he’s a self-important bastard, and according to the selections of his work I’ve been able to get through he’s a morbid pervert.”

Robin chokes on her tea and coughs into her elbow, wheezing. “Cheers for that,” she repeats him, and he grins and shrugs.

“But,” he continues, “his wife who he cheats on prolifically wants him back. Says he’s a good dad. So,” Strike raises his hands, indicating the manuscript before he clears it away from the counter and back into his pocket. He sips his cooling tea and nods to the flowers. “Who’s got roses and lavender in their anniversary bouquet?”

“Ah, your eye is developing,” Robin praises him. She sets aside her tea and tugs the milk glass vase over to begin nudging some of the roses this way and that. “It’s for my tenant upstairs actually, Gertrude. Her husband died last year but they were married forty eight years, can you imagine.”

“Jesus,” Strike murmurs.

“I know,” Robin returns, shaking her head a little as she carefully separates sprigs of baby’s breath from the great cloud of them, trimming the stems with a pair of deadly sharp-looking shears before she tucks them in to some of the bare spaces around the roses.

Strike watches her speculatively.  _ Can you imagine _ . It’s an odd sentiment for a fiancee. A rather dark inclination to poke at that thought niggles at him but he holds his tongue.

“His name’s Dudley,” Robin adds, smiling. “Six kids they had. They call him Dear Old Dud.”

Strike huffs a laugh, widening his eyes a bit at the idea of it. Whole families. Dear old dads.

Robin seems to have caught him in his moment of contemplation when he meets her eye again, but after just a moment’s longer pause she continues as if it never happened.

“Anyway, it’s their first wedding anniversary since he died, and she was showing me pictures the other day. These were all the flowers in her bouquet. Hope it’ll bring up some happy memories at least.”

Strike watches her bowed head, her soft sure hands.

“You’re very kind, Robin,” he says quietly.

She looks up at that, seems about to respond when the shop door opens behind Strike, the bell tinkling. The man who comes in is tall and broad shouldered but thin, in a sharp gray suit and tie. He eyes Strike briefly and frowns, then seems to dismiss him, looking instead to Robin when she greets him.

“Matthew! Hey, you okay?”

“Hey Robs, got the invitations.” He holds up a bundle of papers and drops them on the counter. Strike nudges Robin's tea out of the way, unnoticed while Robin and Matthew share a perfunctory kiss hello.

"Just be a moment, okay?" Robin addresses Strike.

"Not to keep a paying customer waiting but I  _ am _ on my lunch break," Matthew adds to Strike with an appraising look that Strike takes to mean Matthew doubts Strike has the same constrictions on his time.

"Sure," Strike agrees easily, with no small calculation behind it. "No rush."

Robin, smiling nervously, grabs a binder from under the counter and sets it in front of Strike. "Why don't you have a look, chrysanthemums are in season," she adds.

Strike winks at her and obediently opens the binder. He flips through pages slowly, head down, and eyes from his peripheral vision the invitations Robin is spreading out on the counter.

“Well I think I still like these best-”

“They’re the most expensive ones,” Matthew cuts in.

Robin frowns, “But-”

“Is that the best idea with how the shop’s doing?” he asks, meaningfully, his tone playing at concern.

Strike raises his eyebrows at the sea of tulips on the page in front of him.

There’s a weighted pause and when Strike chances a glance up from under his brow Robin’s jaw is set and her eyes glittering. Strike slides from the stool quietly, waving off Robin’s questioning look.

“I’ll come back another time, thanks.”

“Oh, alright,” Robin agrees, flustered, looking from the invitations and Matthew to hers and Strike’s unfinished teas on the counter among her work. “Here,” she adds, coming around the counter and Strike pauses uneasily.

“Take a card,” she hands him one, embossed with the same writing as the window. She looks up at him, hurt and shame and a strange sparkle of defiance in her eyes.

"Cheers," Strike says, taking the card. He glances at Matthew and holds in a scoff, nodding instead and leaving quickly.

Out on the street he lights up a cigarette as he walks briskly through the bracing cold back to his office.

_

  
  


If he had another contact for this particular need, Strike probably still wouldn’t call them up. He sits in his office chair, four cigarettes and two coffees deep, and eyes the cream business card on his desk. Calling her makes perfect sense, given that she is a florist and that using a florist’s services was the first thought that occurred to him upon consideration of his invitation to the Roper-Chard annual party. It would be odd  _ not _ to call her. Employ her shop, that is.

He picks up his phone and dials the number on her card, refuses to make a mental note to save the number to his contacts after the call.

“Ellacott’s Arrangements, how can I help you?”

“Yes, I’ve got a bit of an odd request.”

“. . . okay?”

“Ah, it’s Cormoran, first.”

“Oh! Hello.”

“Hi.”

“How are you?”

“I’m well, yeah, you?”

“Good. Good, sorry about last time, you didn’t need to run out so quickly just because Matthew came.”

“Oh, well,” Strike closes his eyes and then opens them only to roll them at himself. “Didn’t want to interfere with wedding planning. Anyway I really just wanted to stop in to apologize for that last time.”

“Last time? Oh, when we got chips?”

“When I was a drunken fool, yeah.”

Robin laughs softly. “‘S okay.”

He waits for more, for some kind of admonition disguised as a joke, but there’s just Robin’s gentle quiet on the other end of the line.

“Good. Good,” Strike babbles. “Ah, so. I have a bit of a business proposition for you.”

“Professional fuck you flowers?” Robin shoots back excitedly.

Now Strike laughs, leaning back in his chair and turning back and forth. Fuck, he likes her.

“Well, not far off. Remember the case I’m working with the missing author?”

“Oh yes, the terrible one.”

“The very same. So I’ve been invited by his publisher to a party where a lot of people who may have had motive to kill him will be, and I can’t possibly cover everyone I need to.”

“Okay . . . wait he’s dead? I thought he was just missing?”

“Oh, right, yeah, he was definitely murdered. Really really gruesomely.”

“That’s awful,” Robin replies, somehow sounding both dismayed and fascinated. “So what did you need me for?”

Strike pauses infinitesimally at that, then again to curse himself for it.

“Well since I need more ears at this event, I thought you could do up some flowers - paid of course - that I could hide listening devices in. I’ve cleared it with the publisher already, they’ll be paying whatever your rate is.”

“Is that a real thing? Hidden microphones?”

“Well, they’re actually small recorders, but yeah, it is. Quite effective if done right.”

“I thought they were only in movies to tell you the truth.”

They chat through the details of date, number of arrangements, and delivery, and Strike agrees to bring in one of the listening devices for Robin to design around.

Before they ring off she catches him, “Hey Cormoran? I haven’t had many bigger jobs like this, it means a lot that you thought of me.”

Strike smiles, helplessly fond. And so, so fucked.  _ Engaged, engaged, engaged _ , he reminds himself.

“Robin you do good work, anyone can see that.”

He can hear her beaming smile over the phone. “Thanks. See you soon.”

Strike manages to hold off until the end of the day before heading over to Robin’s shop, listening device in hand. The closed sign is in the window, but the lights are on inside and when Strike looks in through the glass Robin’s at the counter with a few rows of small vases laid out in front of her. It’s already dark outside but even with the display window lights turned off, the glow of the inner lights over the counter cast a warm glow over Robin as she works. Strike could stand and watch her for far longer than he does.

He knocks on the door and returns Robin’s smile when she jogs over to let him in.

“Hey, come in, I just had my last pick up of the day so we won’t be interrupted.”

Strike grits his teeth and takes his place on the stool while Robin rounds the counter.

“So this is the-”

“Here.”

Strike looks up from setting the listening device on the counter to see Robin holding out a boutonniere.

“What’s this?”

“Happy birthday,” she says, an irrepressible smile lighting her face.

Strike stares from the flower - a mass of tiny deep burgundy petals with a few variegated spiky leaves below and a stem wrapped in black sueded ribbon - to her and back again, smiling helplessly. He has so many more questions, but,

"How'd you know it was my birthday?"

"Well, Michael Dunleavy's birthday,” Robin explains, blushing. She shrugs, “It was on one of your fake IDs when we got chips. I assumed."

"Confirmation bias,” Strike shoots back, too warm, already reaching to tuck the stem into the buttonhole on the lapel of his blazer.

"'S right though, wasn't I?" Robin asks softly, not meeting his eyes as she reaches across the counter to adjust it for him.

Strike purposefully sets his hands in the counter and looks away, clearing his throat. Robin withdraws quickly. 

“Well, I just thought . . . it was just something silly, you don’t have to-”

Strike smiles at the counter and then up at her. “It’s not something I would ever pick myself but . . . I really like it, Robin, truly, thank you.”

_ And you’re engaged _ hangs between them, unsaid. Strike feels awful, and Robin is beautiful and embarrassed and talented, and he can’t get out of there fast enough, and he wants to stay, and stay, and stay.

He hands over the listening device and leaves as quickly as he can with a reasonable politeness.

Later when he shucks off his blazer in the tiny bedroom of his drafty attic flat, he takes care to remove the boutonniere and set it on the little table beside his bed. Tossing it in the bin would feel kinder to himself than keeping it, but then that’s not really Strike’s specialty. Once he’s put the leg to bed and pulled the covers up he stares at the burgundy flower, sure that if he’d bothered to ask she’d have been able to tell him all about what personal meaning it has to him, and all the while would that engagement ring twinkle with each expressive movement of her hands.

_

  
  


If Strike arrives at the Roper-Chard party ridiculously early, it’s simply out of professional concern that Robin’s got all her setup under control. He makes his way past caterers and a bartender lugging their wares up to the rooftop deck where the party will be held, dodging at one point around a particularly large ice sculpture.

When he steps out onto the deck, there’s Robin in jeans and a coat, hair down and a bit mussed, nose rosy with the chill, twisting a barrel-shaped clear glass vase this way and that at one corner of the bar. The bartender appears to be contemplating chatting her up.

“Fancy a drink, Venetia?” Strike asks, leaning an elbow on the bar beside her.

Robin blinks at him. “How on earth-”

“The invitations,” Strike explains, “I saw when I was pretending to be a paying customer.”

Robin blushes - or it could be the temperature outside - and looks back to the vase topped with a bubbly spill of pastel lime petals surrounding striking black-centered red poppies that are interspersed with some thin bare branches, their many-forked ends wrapped in thread-thin silver wire spirals. She tips her head for him to lean closer and gently separates two poppies to show Strike the small round black listening device clipped onto the inner lip of the vase. 

While they’re peering in, heads tipped close, she adds, “I was conceived in Venice.” Strike grins and leans away. He lights a cigarette for something to do and gestures to the flowers.

“Those look good. I didn’t think to ask, though, what if it falls in the water?”

“Oh,” Robin reaches in and lifts out a second slim cylindrical vase, this one with water inside, then when she sets it back down inside the wider container she fishes around for a moment and a miniature string of clear fairy lights pops on inside the larger vase, giving a perfect excuse for both the double vase and any visible hint of the black plastic listening devices. Strike laughs out loud.

“Fuck Robin, you’re good.”

She only smiles distractedly as she continues fiddling with the flowers until she’s finally satisfied with the angle of each bloom. “So,” she adds, “there are three of these big ones, and then I did seven smaller coordinating versions for the tables, I just have to set those out-”

“D’you need a hand?”

“Oh I still have to bring them up, are you sure-” She stops short and glances down toward his leg. 

Strike pauses. _ When had she found out about his bloody leg? _

“I saw it,” she says quietly, “that night we got chips. I didn’t want to say anything because you never said, I just . . .”

“Well I didn't offer a foot, did I?" Strike shoots back around a drag and exhale of his cigarette.

“Sorry,” Robin says softly, reaching up to rake her fingers through her hair. 

“S’alright,” Strike adds more convincingly, waiting until she flicks her eyes back to his.

She eyes Strike and nods for him to follow her as she heads back toward the lobby. Strike quickly stubs out his cigarette on the way back inside. Robin leads them to a lift Strike hadn’t noticed, punches the down button, and the doors slide open immediately. Once they’ve closed Robin blows out a breath and seems to go away for a moment, looking up toward the ceiling. In the brighter lighting her eyes look a bit red, like her cheeks and nose.

“Are you alright?”

“No, it’s just,” Robin shakes her head and sighs. “I just have to get this finished rather quickly and catch a train. Um . . . Matt’s mom died.”

“Shit, sorry to hear that.”

“She had a stroke,” Robin explains, her voice slightly lowered even in the close quiet space. “She’d been having headaches but no one thought- anyway, I’m catching the train tonight so I can be there for the funeral tomorrow.”

The doors slide open to an underground parking garage and Robin steps out immediately, Strike hurrying to keep up. 

“Robin you could have cancelled this, I would’ve-”

“No,” she cuts him off determinedly, stopped beside an ancient looking Land Rover. The back is open and inside are large white cardboard boxes. “I’d already used the deposit to buy the supplies before we got the call.” 

She leans in and pulls out a box and Strike immediately takes it from her, nodding her on when she gives him a warmly exasperated smile. “Anyway with it being for you- I mean . . . I mean with the  _ additions _ I couldn’t exactly have my delivery guy fill in to set them up. Anyway, Matt’s . . . it’ll be fine. I get there in time.”

She faces him again, arms full of two smaller boxes and they watch each other for a beat before she heads back for the lift. Strike shifts his box to one arm and presses the button for them this time. When the doors slide closed Strike waits another beat in the heavy quiet air.

“So that car-”

“It’s a family heirloom,” Robin says, glancing at him sideways with a knowing smile.

Strike widens his eyes innocently. “Was just going to say you should really have the shop name on the side to match the window.”

Robin barks out a laugh, sounding surprised at herself. “I don’t know that it’s the best advertisement for a flower shop.”

They step off at the lobby again and after fifteen minutes have the rest of the arrangements set out strategically throughout the party space. Strike follows Robin back to the lift without thinking, trying to casually watch the numbers above the doors as they close to distract from his superfluousness.

Silence sets in and stretches.

“If . . .”

“Yeah?” Robin asks, still looking staunchly ahead.

“If you need anything, you can call me.” Strike glances at her cautiously and sees it when she looks down, the sad smile she tries to hide behind the warm gold curtain of her hair.

“Okay,” she agrees quietly.

The doors slide open and she steps out, heading toward the Land Rover again without a look back. Strike starts pressing the door close button repeatedly before he can say anything else.

_

  
  


Strike decides to stop pretending to himself that he goes to Ellacott’s Arrangements for anything other than personal reasons anymore. 

In part because it’s pointless. He hasn’t thought Robin was faking through his visits to make a sale since the second time he’d been in her shop, and by now he’s sure she looks forward to him darkening her door as much as he does. So he might as well for as long as he’s welcome.

The other part is he’s beginning to think about flowers now, beginning to notice them at the grocers, on tables in lobbies and foyers, even in advertisements. He’s not moved much beyond the basics of recognizing which are which but . . . colors. He remembers the colors. He remembers Robin’s careful hands tucking and weaving and building disparate parts into dynamic wholes, beautiful in themselves and always moreso when she’s telling their stories.

When he gets the call that Leonora Quine is being released he catches a cab and sees her home, stands back and watches quietly as Leonora and Orlando sob and hug. 

Next he goes to Robin’s with two coffees in hand. It’s about time he reciprocated her reliable offerings of tea. He passes a man in the doorway, an intricate sweeping bouquet in shades of brilliant purple in one hand, tucking a velvet ring box into his coat pocket with his other.

“Godspeed, mate,” Strike nods to the younger man, who gives him a nervous distracted smile before he hurries off.

Robin’s smile is heavy when Strike approaches the counter but she brightens and accepts the coffee he offers her happily.

“Should see the amethyst ring he’s got in that box, it’s stunning,” she says over the rim of her cup.

Strike hums noncommittally and reaches into his pocket. “So I’ve brought a sketch for you to replicate after all,” Strike says. 

He pulls out the first page of Quine’s original Bombyx Mori from his pocket and sets it on the counter. Robin smiles down at it, fingertips smoothing out a wrinkled corner gently.

“Okay,” she says softly.

“Hey, you alright?”

She sighs and shakes her head then meets his eyes. “Yes. It’s just been a long few weeks. The funeral and then . . . well it’s just been a stressful time. I’m alright, thanks.”

She rests a hand on Strike’s briefly, not pausing before she sets down her coffee and pulls a binder from under the counter.

“Did you tell me her name last time, I’m sorry I-”

“It’s Orlando. Her mum’s been released from police custody today. They arrested her for Owen’s death even though there was no reason to think she could have done it if they’d paid any attention. But. She’s home again now. And I thought . . .” 

He gestures to the drawings, thinking of Robin’s observation about the red gerbera daisies, and of the cluttered and rather dark Quine house, and of the mother and daughter who would now be free of the miserable man they’d loved.

“You’re a bit of a romantic, aren’t you?” Robin asks, eyeing him over the top of her coffee cup before she takes a sip.

“Well I’m not proposing to Leonora Quine if that’s what you mean.”

Robin shakes her head at him fondly and flips through the pages of the binder. “So we’ll do the red gerberas of course. Then I think for this one-”

The bell tinkles and a mail carrier comes in, gives Strike a nod and sets a stack of post on the counter. On top is a magazine with Charlotte Campbell and Jago Ross on the cover.

_ Mrs. Jago Ross _ .

Robin’s going on in her broad Northern cadence about Orlando’s fanciful drawings and how she’ll bring them to life. 

Strike stares at the magazine cover, absently puzzled at the lack of emotion welling up. The shape of Charlotte’s absence is filling in, the pain left in it shrunk down to an echo of loss with all the desire drained out of it. The face on the magazine cover is flat and harmless, removed from him and confined to its glossy page. So much of his life had been consumed by Charlotte that when she left he was still consumed with her and yet now-

“Cormoran? Where’d you go?” Robin asks, smiling.

Strike blinks up into Robin’s soft blue eyes.

“Nowhere. I’m here.”

_

  
  


Part Three

_ Show no fear _

_ For things we can't control _

_ Hoping that you see how great that feels _

Change it All - Harrison Storm

The knock on the door is more of a pounding, but Strike’s pounded on enough doors himself to not think much of it. The courier is in black leathers, helmet on with the visor down, which is off-putting but not so unusual as to raise alarm on its own. The signing sheet is empty of any other writing and there’s no carbon copy beneath it, just the single page on the clipboard and nothing else. The courier never speaks, only confirms Strike’s questioning announcement of his own name by holding out the box for him to take.

The box itself is reason enough for Strike’s distraction from all these things that he won’t remember until later. 

The box is Robin’s - for that’s how he thinks of it now, not an Ellacott’s Arrangements box with the familiar green and gold printing on the label, but  _ Robin’s _ \- and what on earth could she be sending him?  _ Flowers, genius _ , he mulls as he carries it with the rest of his post up the metal staircase to his offices. It had been a bit of a morning already, what with running out of both coffee and cigarettes, necessitating first-thing shopping and subsequent return at the same time as the courier. 

Why would Robin be sending him flowers? Did she expect not to see him within a week? He’d been trying to ration himself to no more than once a week; another uptick in business after the nominal notoriety of Owen Quine’s case had been helping him along in that regard. Then there’s Elin with her icy beauty and relaxed compartmentalization, both of which suit him well. Sometimes in certain lamplight her hair takes on a golden tinge - almost red - and it fucks him up. But he can blink past it - past her hair and her daughter and how out of place he feels in her immaculately feminine flat. Afterall, he reminds himself strictly and often, Robin is engaged. To kind of a twat, but. No accounting for taste.

The long rectangular box is lightweight white cardboard like the ones he’d helped Robin carry for the Roper-Chard party, and had also seen folded down flat and tucked in stacks under the part of the counter at the shop. This box feels, both in the crook of his arm, and when he sets it down on the desk in the outer office, too heavy and solid. He hasn’t got a temp again until next week and the desk is getting rather cluttered. He flips quickly through the post but there’s nothing important and then he stands staring down at the box, puzzling. It’s silly to stand there in his own office staring at the thing with trepidation, but it’s so subtly strange that he can’t help it. 

Why would Robin send him flowers?

Finally he digs a letter opener out of the top drawer of the desk and slits the copious tape along the edge of the box to reveal  _ another _ box inside, this one regular brown cardboard. Strike cuts through the tape on that as well, flips open the lid and stops.

The skin is pale and barely mottled, too smooth to be a man’s. 

There’s a card balanced on the calf. 

He knows better, professionally, than to pick it up but his fingers still itch to. There’s no name on the envelope but it’s just thin enough that when he squints he can make out a bit of the writing on the card inside. 

He recognizes the handwriting. 

He should stay and call the police from the office phone on the desk right beside him, but he can’t. He runs.

By the bottom of the stairs his stump is protesting. He pushes past too many people on the sidewalk but it hardly matters. He’d left the office door unlocked which was bloody stupid but even that thought flits away from his singleminded focus. It’s too long and barely any time at all before he reaches Ellacott’s Arrangements and shoves in through the familiar green painted door, the bell tinkling ridiculously behind him as he charges across the small space and yells for Robin.

She appears from around the corner where the coolers are kept, a small bubble-shaped pink bouquet in her hands.

“Cormoran?” she says, half-laughing, “What is it?”

“Are you alright?” he pants.

“Well, yes,” she says, still seeming amused, looking down at herself and holding up the flowers, mystified. “What’s going on?”

Strike holds up a hand and finally pulls out his mobile to find the right number and dial. As it rings he goes over to the door, flips the sign to closed, and locks the deadbolt, much to Robin’s confusion. She’s got half a protest out when Strike speaks into his mobile, to Wardle:

“I’ve been sent a leg.”

_

  
  


“So you came here before calling?”

“Yes, it was in one of her boxes, and I’m pretty sure the card inside had her handwriting.”

Wardle eyes Strike with his familiar bored suspicion, before glancing meaningfully at Robin who is shakily flipping through her diary with the new D.I. whose name Strike hasn’t retained since the first hurried introduction. Strike eyes Wardle back.

“Look, obviously whoever used one of her boxes and had her write the bloody card knows I’ve been here a lot,” he says with a lowered voice. “That’s not a fucking novel observation, Wardle.”

Wardle simply raises his eyebrows infuriatingly and says nothing for a beat before asking Strike if there may be any further details about the courier that have come back to him since he gave his first description not fifteen minutes before. Strike repeats everything he’d already said and Wardle effectively releases him when he takes a call on his mobile from one of the officers covering the scene at Strike’s office.

Strike drifts toward the counter where Robin’s now rifling through her records for her notes, explaining the details of the phone order for the card and box Strike had received.

“The lyrics were memorable, not ones you’d expect on a card with a bouquet of white roses, but then there are always strange ones. They’re really-” Robin’s voice shakes a bit and she visibly calms herself, “some of them are really very personal, even the phone orders that they have me write out.”

Robin finds the little packet of her notes and hands them over to the DI, looking past her at Strike as he leans on the counter across from them. She steps around the counter and stops next to Strike, arms folded tight at her middle and her face still drawn and pale. The DI steps away to confer with Wardle.

“You alright?” Strike asks, shifting to lean a hand on the edge of the counter. He won’t sit on the stool, it’s too casual. The whole place feels colder.

“Yeah, think so,” Robin answers, nodding unconvincingly, “You?”

“I’m-” Strike shakes his head and hangs it low, looking at his feet instead of her as he continues quietly, “I’m so fucking sorry Robin. I swear I’m going to-”

“Cormoran, it’s not your fault,” Robin reaches out and puts her hand over his on the counter, this time leaving it, her fingers wrapping around his. 

She’s turned toward him, touching his hand and in his space, looking up at his downturned face, and this is the closest they’ve been to each other since the brief moment at the Roper-Chard party when she’d been showing him the brilliant way she’d constructed the vases. He wants to lean into her and the desire seems so stupid and selfish in the midst of everything.

A knock sounds at the door and Matthew strides in, stuttering when he sees Robin pull her hand quickly away from Strike’s.

“Matthew, hey,” she greets him, swallowing audibly as she meets him for a hug. Strike meets Matthew’s eyes over Robin’s shoulder and a beat passes before Strike looks away.

It’s another twenty minutes of reviewing the same stories, Robin touring the DIs through the areas of the shop where the supplies are stored, the exit to the back alley, and her records of the order for a dozen white roses and a card with only the lyrics to a Blue Oyster Cult song.

“So listen, we’ll need you,” DI Ekwensi, whose name Strike had asked again when he could actually retain it, tells him, “to come back to your offices with us for a few more questions. Ms. Ellacott if you’d like to re-open for the day I think we’re almost done here.”

“Probably best to close up, don’t you think?” Matthew asks the DI. Robin frowns but watches DI Ekwensi for her answer.

“It’s really up to you, Miss Ellacott. Once we’re cleared out there’s no reason you can’t continue to operate, we’ll both leave our cards in case you remember anything else, and we’ll just need the number for your delivery man to follow up as well.”

“I think . . . well I’ve got orders to finish for later today and tomorrow morning,” Robin glances between the DI and Matthew, and lastly she addresses Strike, “I think I’ll go mad staying at home, I need to at least try to work.”

Strike gives her a nod and carefully avoids the incredulous glare Matthew’s directed at him.

“Post a plainclothes nearby, would you?” Strike asks DI Ekwensi, who nods in agreement. He addresses himself to Robin, “Have the officer drive you, I don’t want you going home alone.”

Matthew pulls his arm from around Robin and steps forward, glaring. “That’s about enough, why don’t you go back to your dodgy offices and leave Robin alone?”

“Matt,” Robin starts, reaching for his arm. 

He allows himself to be tugged back toward her but tosses back at Strike as he goes. “From now on get your flowers at the grocers like everyone else.”

Strike sees it when Robin’s face drops in shock, then hurt, then resignation. She’s blinking away tears when she drops Matthew’s arm and turns away to escape into the office.

Strike watches the realization flicker across Matthew’s face and glances toward the office himself but thinks better of it. He leaves with DIs Ekwensi and Wardle. 

The bell trills their exit cheerfully.

_

  
  


It’s two days later when Strike can’t wait anymore after only the briefest and driest updates from Wardle that tell him the investigation isn’t going to go the way it needs to, nor quickly enough. 

He stops for teas first and on a whim gets a couple of scones too. As he makes his way along the sidewalk he clocks the plainclothes officer watching the shop from a cafe across the street and lets out a breath, somewhat relieved. The guy could be useless in action but at least he’s got eyes and a mobile. Strike opens the door to the empty shop just enough to slip through, just barely disturbing the bell above.

Robin’s head still snaps up as if he’s taken the door out with a cannon.

“Hey,” Strike says quietly, holding up the teas in their cardboard carrier and the paper bag of scones.

“Hi,” she sighs with obvious relief. “I’m sorry I’m jumpy.”

“It’s understandable.” Strike crosses the quiet shop and sets everything down on the counter. He pauses, not sitting automatically but waiting until Robin gestures to the stool, eyeing him.

“You’re staying for a bit, aren’t you?”

“I can yeah,” he replies, struck by her patent trust and welcoming of him.

“Oh these smell heavenly,” she sighs, opening up the bag and sticking her nose in, “did you get them from that place by the bookshop?”

“Yeah, you like it?”

“It’s my favorite ‘round here.” 

“Listen I came also to give you these,” Strike pulls the three printouts from his pocket and spreads them out on the counter. “Have you seen any of these three men here, around your flat, anywhere?”

Robin inspects the pictures closely before shaking her head. “I don’t remember any of them no, and I am pretty good with faces.”

“Yeah,” Strike agrees, thinking back to the start and her easy familiarity. He shakes out of it quickly and back to the task at hand.

“Is one of them-?” Robin draws in on herself a bit.

“The lyrics point to Jeff Whittaker,” he points to Whittaker’s picture. “But I’m going over each of them to see what I can rule out.”

“Aren’t the police investigating someone else? They brought ‘round pictures too, of a guy called Malley?”

Strike sighs in annoyance and shrugs. “This doesn’t feel like Malley to me. It’s too personal. He wouldn’t bother going through you.”

Robin rolls her eyes and blows out a breath. “Comforting,” she mutters.

He shakes his head. “They chose you because they knew it would get my attention.”

“But that wasn’t your fault,” Robin shoots back. 

Strike holds up his hands in a shrug and keeps her gaze, feeling awful and helpless and ferociously protective. Isn’t it? Isn’t his fault he’d come in through the damn green door to begin with?

“I’m gonna find him Robin. I’ve got to. I’m going to figure out who did this, I promise you.”

And there he goes making promises he can’t possibly guarantee.

“I know you will,” Robin says softly. Something flashes in her eyes but she visibly dismisses it and puts on a purposefully joking air. “In any case I  _ do _ have the closest flower shop to your offices, but frankly it’s a bit insulting that you don’t think they chose my shop on its own merits.”

Strike huffs a laugh. She’s painfully endearing. But he’d had more than one reason to come see her this day. It had been on his mind anyway since the beginning of the month and inappropriate as it may be he can’t imagine not making the familiar trip to Ellacott’s Arrangements, the current terrible circumstances surrounding the leg be damned.

“Alright, not that I think you’re in  _ need _ of more work,” he starts, continuing her joke, “but I do have a job for you.”

“Of course,” she says through a mouthful of scone. She swallows and takes a sip of tea as well. “I’d be a bit put out if you broke our unwritten contract for my shop to provide all floral-related services for your investigations, to be honest.”

Strike sighs and drops the joke, unable to tear his eyes away from her. 

This is the moment he can’t deny or explain it away to himself any longer. His affection for Robin no longer has anything to do with her proximity to his first painful brush with freedom from Charlotte. If it were just an idle attraction built in convenience and aesthetics, well, Elin would have superseded Robin in his thoughts by now.

The boutonniere she’d given him still sits beside his bed, dried out so he’s afraid to touch it for fear the petals will crumble to dust. He’s gripped all over again with a compulsion to ask her what the flower she’d used means, why she’d chosen it. 

Why she’d chosen him.

“Robin I didn’t want to go anywhere else.” 

He shouldn’t be looking at her when he says it, but he is, and he does, and he sees the impossibly tender warmth in her eyes, the swell of her cheeks with her sweet smile. She’s tired and sad and so, so-

Strike reaches over and slides the sheaf of papers toward her, and the mug full of pencils, drowning under the weight of the moment but muzzled by the ring on her finger. His realizations mean fuckall.

Robin chooses a pencil and clears her throat. “What d’you need then?” she asks carefully, pulling them back to neutral.

“Ah, they’re for a grave,” Strike says. “It’s the anniversary tomorrow, actually. Seventeen years. Died when she was just a few years older than I am now.”

Recognition dawns on Robin’s face but she doesn’t ask, doesn’t say anything more than, “Tell me about her?” she asks.

“She loved us, I know she did, just made a mess of everything else. String of worthless boyfriends and husbands. She . . . she wanted to be in love. She was, I suppose. Over and over again. She grew up in Cornwall, St. Mawes, and she ended up here, following bands around.”

“She wanted to be in love,” Robin repeats softly.

She pulls out a binder from below the desk and sets it gently down, flipping through the slick plastic pages as he’s seen her do time after time. 

In the past he’d rarely brought flowers - Uncle Ted or Lucy or even Shanker had been the ones to bring them and Strike had simply cleared them away when he’d found them shriveled and brown. Now Robin’s come into his life and where before flowers had seemed a rather flat stand in for what may or may not be genuine sentiment, he’s begun to see the meaning of them.

Robin’s collage of pictures grows between them on the counter. None of her choices are white like she’d once told him were traditional for funerals, but instead deep purple tulips, blood red roses, towering hot pink snapdragons, and heart-shaped leaves of electric lime foliage.

“Wait,” Robin says, and sets down a last picture, sky-blue globes of tiny spiky petals bobbing at the ends of pale green stems, surrounded by leggy beds of deep green leaves. Strike instantly recognizes them as the sea holly that grew near his aunt and uncle’s during the broken years he’d spent growing up there.

“There,” Robin finishes.

“Yeah,” he sighs. He smiles at the mix of them. “Yeah that’s her.”

“What’s the name?”

“Leda.”

_

  
  


When Strike arrives at Ellacott’s Arrangements the following evening he’s only a few minutes late for the time he and Robin had agreed he would come to pick up but the shop is already dark and the closed sign hung in the door. Strike frowns at it. Robin had agreed so readily to do the flowers for Leda’s grave even after the ghastly result of Strike’s acquaintance, he’d really thought-

Strike’s mobile buzzes in his pocket and he swipes away a text from Shanker, scrolling through his contacts until he finds Robin’s number. After a moment’s debate he hits call.

“‘Lo?”

“Robin? It’s Cormoran, are you alright?”

There’s music in the background, loud, and voices; it sounds like she’s at a pub. He can almost make out the song-

“Shit, your mum’s flowers,  _ shit _ . I’m so-sorry, I’m just-” her voice breaks, wobbly and high - she’s crying.

“Robin, where are you, are you alright?”

“I meant to make them, I did but then-”

“Robin I don’t care about the flowers, just tell me where you are.”

Finally she mumbles that she’s at the Tottenham. He tries to keep her on the phone but she’s speaking indistinctly to someone else and then the call ends abruptly.

Strike does as near as he can to running the few blocks to the pub.

When he heaves open the door Robin’s there on the threshold, the woosh of air sweeping her hair about her pale and puffy face.

“Jesus!” Strike exclaims, more at the suddenness of finding her at the door than her appearance, but she snorts derisively and rolls her eyes, pushing past him.

“Thanks, mate, least I know my looks match my mood.”

Strike limps helplessly after her, wincing with every step and trying to keep up.

“Robin where are we going?”

“Shop. ‘M gonna do your mum’s flowers.”

“You don’t have to do the-”

“Yes, actually, yes I do, it’s-” she whirls around in what’s clearly about to become a tirade but stops short, taking his stooped posture and labored breathing he’s trying to get under control.

“Look we can go to your shop if you’ll slow the fuck down.” He lifts a hand and drops it back to his side in surrender. 

She takes a steadying breath and off Cormoran’s nod of acquiescence she hurries over, stumbling once, and installs herself under his arm, tugging some of his weight onto her own shoulder as they set unsteadily off. 

“Sorry,” she adds. “I know your leg-”

“‘S’alright, just-” he motions onward and the rest of the trip they make in silence.

Back at the shop Robin turns on the lights only in the back half of the store, leaving off the window front spotlights and keeping the door sign turned to “Closed.”

Strike collapses heavily onto the stool at the counter and Robin stands at the doorway of the office, watching him unabashedly. 

“Come in here,” she murmurs.

Strike looks up, brow furrowed as he rubs at his knee ineffectually.

“I’ve a more comfortable chair in here, ‘s all. Well, prob’ly better than the stool anyway.”

Strike nods and heaves himself back up again, doesn’t bother as much about how he’s hobbling and leaning heavily on the counter. Robin holds the back of the desk chair for him and he spins himself once he’s settled to turn his back to the shop. 

The office behind its rose red door is small and dominated by an old metal desk shoved into one corner. Above the desk is a large corkboard scattered with pictures of pottery and candles, plus more of Robin’s sketches, and a few photos among the spare pins. A set of shelves opposite the desk holds rows of file boxes and on top sits a kettle and some things for tea. 

Robin carefully steps over Strike’s outstretched good leg to get to the kettle and then leans into the corner of the small room, arms folded over her middle, still in her coat. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose are bright pink from the chill outside.

“Alright,” Strike says, willing both their focus off his damned leg. “What’s happened? Is it the investigation?”

Robin smiles darkly and lets out a humorless laugh. It ends up a little wet and she wipes it on her sleeve.

“No it’s not actually, it’s nothing to do with the investigation at all. It’s Matt.”

Strike focuses suddenly on her left hand and its bare fourth finger.

“You’re not wearing your engagement ring.”

Robin barrels on as if she hadn’t heard him.

“We had a double date for lunch with some friends from Uni - well. Matt’s friends, not really mine. Definitely not mine. And all she could talk about was you, how the paper today said you were involved with the . . .” she swallows and closes her eyes, “you know. And all about your high profile cases, and your father, and how was it  _ my _ shop was the one they chose to use to send it and my mustn’t  _ you _ have been buying  _ ever _ so many flowers from sweet Robin’s  _ dinky little shop _ while she’s off at  _ Christie’s _ .”

Robin cuts off when the kettle’s ready and pours two mugs for tea, only sloshing one a bit. Strike leans forward to take his from her with two hands, wincing in anticipation when she makes her way back across the tiny amount of free floor space and sits on the desk. She pulls her feet up and crosses her legs, resting her elbows on her knees and hunching over her mug to blow on it.

Strike waits, watching her.

“Sarah Shadlock is the most annoying woman I know and- and he-” she crumples into tears again and Strike closes his eyes, sure now that he’s found the plot. He bites his tongue.  _ Fucking moron, that Matthew _ .

Robin sniffles wetly and closes her eyes, turning her face up to the ceiling for a long moment. The fluorescents aren’t on, just a small butter yellow desk lamp that casts soft dark shadows over half her face. Strike sits stone still, his absence of leg throbbing, whatever heart he has left raging in his chest. Silence sits in the room with them like a third being, the night sounds of the street outside faraway and Gertrude upstairs characteristically quiet. 

Something occurs to Strike and he breaks the pause, hoping the pivot will be welcome.

“How’d you end up here?"

“I took some courses, floral arranging, and business when I was . . . well I was at uni and then-” Robin pauses and sips her tea, gesturing as if to shortcut her explanation. Strike detects a weight in her pause that speaks of concealment before she begins again, “My aunt died. She was my father’s sister-in-law, and she was the last in her family, and they owned this building. My uncle didn’t have any use for it and the last shop tenant had just left. So he offered it to me. Gertrude’s rent covers a fair bit of the expenses.”

Strike leaves all the pauses aside, the glaring gaps of something that she’s left out. It’s obviously not his to know. Instead he gestures, smiling a little. “So now you have a shop.”

“Yes,” Robin says, meeting his eyes again. There’s a little steel sneaking back into the blue. “By the generosity of several generations and dear Gertrude, I have this shop.”

Strike allows the smile he’s feeling he spread a bit on his face as Robin’s own does as well. She sits up a little straighter and shakes her hair back.

“Shit, your flowers,” she exclaims again.

She scrambles off the desk and narrowly avoids falling into Strike’s lap as she edges by him through the doorway out into the shop. Strike, feeling ridiculous but loathe to put any weight on his stump, scoots himself in the chair after her.

“Robin you don’t have to-”

“Fuck’s sake, stop saying that!” She appears around the corner with an armload of flowers wrapped loosely in tissue. “This is my business. You’ve paid for my services and I’m going to deliver what I promised. I’m going to set  _ something _ right today.”

Strike blanches a bit and holds up his hands in surrender. Apparently drunk Robin swings a bit wide. Robin drops the flowers on the counter, rustles about in some files for her notes and distractedly peels out of her coat, dropping it over the knob of the office door. She rubs her slim hands together while her eyes flick over her notes and she seems to quiet, suddenly. She takes a deep breath in and out and closes her eyes for a long moment.

“Sorry. This isn’t about me. It’s for your mum. I’m sorry.” She takes another shakier breath and nods, falling into something resembling professionalism even through her tears and her drunkenness. She’s grim, determined, somehow unshakeable. “Sorry, I forgot to ask, is it a plot or a mausoleum?”

“Plot with a headstone,” Strike answers, confused. 

He surreptitiously rolls himself closer until he can sidle around the end of the counter to stay out of her way as she rummages in the cabinets below the counter, emerging after a moment with a rectangular heavy-looking pot with a textured glossy black finish. “This’ll sit by a headstone without getting blown over too easily in the wind,” she explains. “Mausoleums I do a bouquet because they have the little holder things.”

“Little holder things,” Strike repeats.

“‘S a technical term,” Robin returns with a straight face, not looking up as she begins to unwrap each bundle from their tissue. 

Strike leans back in the chair and watches quietly as Robin fits a piece of green foam into the vase and begins selecting stems from the bunches and clipping them to length. She’s bleary, stopping occasionally to wipe her nose on her wrist, but she’s focused too. Calmer.

“How’s your leg?” she asks after a few minutes’ silence, not looking up from her work.

“Got blown off,” he tosses back tiredly.

Robin hums a casual response. “How’d it happen?” she adds.

“Army, Afghanistan.” He doesn’t offer more, and he feels shit for it, but the particulars of that experience he can’t quite get out sober. Not yet anyway. 

Robin stops to stand back, turn the vase this way and that, and frown at her work. “Why did you become an investigator?”

“S’what I did in the army. Royal Military Police, Special Investigation Branch.”

“D’you love it?”

That takes him aback, a bit. Robin’s eyes are on him, he can tell, but he’s staring with glazed over eyes at a hot pink snapdragon petal that’s fallen from its bloom and now rests alone on the counter.

“My training makes me good at it, but that’s really just getting used to following a procedure, being thorough.” He pauses. “It suits me,” he finishes.

Robin nods as if she approves of this answer. “Tea?” she asks.

“You’ve already made-”

“Oh right, well d’you want it back then?”

“Sure.”

When Robin’s finished, as much as the flowers are so exactly his mother in all her warmth and dark romance, Strike can’t stomach the idea of going to her grave tonight. More to the point, he can’t stomach the idea of leaving Robin in the state she’s in.

“D’you have somewhere to stay?” he asks.

Robin’s eyes flick to his.

“Not- I mean. There’s a sofa in the offices but it’s awful, I just meant could I walk you somewhere, it’s late . . .”

Robin holds his gaze as he trails off, his current inability to walk anyone anywhere there in the silence.

He sighs in annoyance. “I need to be able to set something right too I suppose.”

“The sofa at my flat’s pretty awful too. So if it’s all the same I’d much rather cry into a pillow on yours.”

Strike swallows. “Will that cause more problems? With-”

“Well I could have a go at Sarah Shadlock’s fiance, I suppose, but short of that I think I’m in the clear.”

Strike smiles sadly and acquiesces. “Would it be terrible of me to ask to leave those here for the night?”

“Course. D’you like them?”

“They’re perfect,” he says quietly, looking her in the eye.

Robin wells up again, fresh tears spilling readily down her cheeks as she gathers up the potted bouquet and puts it away in the coolers. 

“Have my final bill then?” he asks when she returns, scrubbing her hands over her cheeks. 

Robin laughs roughly but freely as she gathers the leftover flowers in a messy pile with their tissue paper wrappings and puts them, rather less neatly, Strike suspects, in the coolers as well. The stem clippings and stray leaves on the counter she ignores, gathering up her coat and bag instead. The pink snapdragon petal still lies there amidst the debris.

_

  
  


Strike wakes at the first light of dawn to his mobile buzzing with a text:

“Thanks for everything. Come round any time for the flowers. Sorry -xR

He closes his eyes and sighs, looks over at the now-dusty boutonniere on his bedside table, and rashly sweeps it into the bin. He winces at himself even as he does it but-

What’s to be done? 

The hope that had flared when he’d seen she'd texted feels like sick now. He’s disgusted with himself and the portion of the night he’d spent hyper-aware that she was a floor below him tossing and turning on the inadequate office sofa. He should have got her a hotel - he’s doing more than well enough to have done that - and not brought her back with him, but it had all just unfolded before him and the truth is he hadn’t wanted to keep her at a distance. He’s loathe to be the man waiting in the wings, waiting for his chance behind a shit like Matthew. Yet here he is, hoarding a dusty dried out flower given to him by a woman who’d become a target of a killer who had it out for Strike himself.

With a leaden focus, Strike dresses, cleans his teeth, and braves the stairs down to the office. He leaves the blanket where it’s neatly folded on the sofa, continues past the desk where the boxed leg had sat, takes his overcoat off the hook and then on down the next flights of stairs to the street.

The walk to Ellacott’s Arrangements takes ages and when he arrives there’s an unfamiliar young bloke behind the counter who politely delivers Strike his flowers and takes payment. Strike asks after Robin, his curiosity forever winning out over self-loathing, and receives only “she’s not in today,” in answer.

The flowers are extravagantly bright against the freezing gray morning when he sets them at Leda’s grave, petals rattling in the wind but clinging fast to their stems.

_

  
  


Strike feels a bit wrong somehow leaving for Scotland without telling Robin, but between the trove of information he gets on Laing and Wardle’s revelation of the DNA match on the leg, he’s distracted enough. He’s pouring back through girl’s letters from the nutter drawer and everything he can find online about body dysmorphia and amputation when there’s a knock at the office door.

And there she is.

Robin looks slightly less worse for wear than she had the last time he’d seen her in this doorway, bedraggled and tear-stained.

“Hey,” she says with a nervous smile, and he gets over his surprise enough to allow her in quickly.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, I was in Masham actually, I went to see my family for a bit.”

“Good, good, I picked up the flowers and when you weren’t there I wasn’t sure if I should-”

“No, I . . . I wasn’t either,” she cuts in. 

She rubs her palms on her jeans nervously until Strike indicates she should sit on the sofa and leans himself back against the desk.

“I was away as well actually, in Edinburgh, checking on some leads.”

“Oh yeah, d’you find anything out?”

“A lot about Laing, yeah, and a bit more about Brockbank. Thing is-” Strike cuts off, a thought ocurring to him.

Robin smiles unsurely and waits before finally asking, “What?”

“Could you make a phone call?”

“A phone call?”

“Yes,” Strike moves around the desk and rifles through the files spread open across it. “Yeah, this number is for Holly Brockbank, she’s Noel’s sister, and she’s receiving his military pension. He’s had a string of jobs here and all over, but his pension goes to her and he’s obviously not living off it and I can’t find him. She’s met me before, I can’t take any chance she’d suspect, but if you call and tell her you’re from a law firm looking to get settlements for servicemen injured outside combat-”

“She’ll lead you to her brother if she thinks she can get more money out of it,” Robin finishes.

Strike slaps the table and points at her. “Exactly. You’re good Robin.”

She smiles. “Okay. Okay yeah. Now?”

“Yeah, if you-”

“Yeah I can,” Robin gets up and comes over to the side of the desk. She takes the phone when Strike hands it to her, having already dialed, and clears her throat while it rings. Strike sits back in the desk chair and tries not to stare too hard.

“Hello, do I have Holly Brockbank? Good, I’m Venetia Hall calling from Hardacre and Hall, personal injury lawyers. Are you the sister of Noel Brockbank?”

Strike zones out on the details of what Robin’s saying, too taken with her sudden transformation from a recently downtrodden florist transplanted from Yorkshire, to a London-born posh lawyer doing her diligence to get paid. Her whole air is changed, a cunning he hadn’t fully seen before suddenly revealed and the steely look in her eye that he does recognize shining full force. She’s mesmerizing. He barely pulls it together to shuffle a pen and paper in front of her when she starks motioning frantically for them and then jots down quickly an address and telephone number. She rings off and blows out a breath as she hands the phone back to Strike.

“Dunno where that came from,” she says, laughing almost giddily.

“Well,” Strike turns the paper she’d scribbled on around so he can read it and type the address in on his computer. He turns away, hoping that not looking directly at her for a moment will help him get his face under control. “If you ever decide you want a side job, let me know.”

“Might take you up on that,” Robin answers. When Strike looks up she’ suddenly at the door, readying to leave. She sees him start to rise from the chair and waves him off. “I just wanted to come by to say thanks again, and sorry I ran out that morning.”

“Don’t apologize,” Strike chides her gently.

Robin shrugs a little, doorknob in hand. “I’ll see you soon?”

“Yes, you will, I’ll come by.”

“‘Kay. Good.” Her cheeks flush a brilliant pink before she spins and shuts the door behind her.

He can’t help but feel he should have tried harder, should have kept her there a moment longer somehow. He can’t help but feel as if he’s running out of time.

_

  
  


He calls her from Shanker’s car, after it all.

“Robin?”

“Cormoran? Are you okay?”

“Robin we’ve got him. It’s Donald Laing, they’ve got him in custody.”

“Oh,” he can hear the rush of air from her sigh into the receiver, and another knot in his own chest releases at the sound of her relief. “Thank god for that. Are you alright?”

“Eh.” Strike decides not to answer that in detail. Shanker punches him in the shoulder and cackles, causing a mild uproar as they shove at eachother and Strike shushes him.

“Cormoran? Are you sure you’re alright, do you need-”

“Just an old associate, he helped me out with something.”

“Making phone calls for you too?” Robin asks congenially.

“No, you are definitely my number one undercover agent for phone work.” He’ll catch hell from Shanker for the next several years about it, and he’s actually on his way from a crime scene to hospital to be checked over after an altercation with a murderer, and he can’t stop grinning stupidly.

“Listen I’m at the shop tomorrow if you-”

“Yeah, I’ll be there. I’ll see you then.”

“Okay good. Cormoran?”

“Yeah?”

There’s a pause, a long one, and aren’t there always with them lately? Strike closes his eyes and waits.

“I’ll see you tomorrow then,” Robin repeats hurriedly, not waiting for a response before she ends the call.

Strike blows out a painful breath and leans his head back against the headrest of his seat. 

Tomorrow.

_

  
  


The bell rings, the door knocking into it loudly as Strike maneuvers his way into Ellacott’s Arrangements, two file boxes in his arms.

“Be out in a tick!” Robin calls from the office.

“It’s me,” Strike calls back.

“Oh hey!” Robin appears, leaning back in her desk chair to peak around the doorway. She frowns questioningly at the boxes but Strike waves her off after setting them down on the counter. 

The bell tinkles again as a customer enters and Robin quickly appears from the office to greet her. Strike settles on his stool and contemplates the place as Robin and the woman discuss parameters for a quote for her daughter’s wedding. They’re done quickly enough once Robin has given the woman a card and when the door closes behind her Robin addresses Strike, eyeing the boxes with a raised brow.

“Nothing scary, promise,” Strike says, holding up a hand in oath.

Robin squints at him suspiciously, smiling, but reaches out to take the lid off one of the boxes, finding it full of old case notes. She frowns.

“What’s this?”

“I wasn’t sure if you could use it but I’d needed to clean up the office a bit anyway. I do keep most of my notes on paper, you see,” he pauses briefly, imploring her to jump ahead and see his point before he has to explain it, but Robin waits expectantly, “and I remembered you’d said . . . you wanted to collect paper from businesses to recycle into-”

“The floral paper, for the- you remembered that?” Robin reaches into the box and picks up a sheet of notebook paper covered in Strike’s own handwriting. She runs her fingers over it and looks back up at him.

“Yes,” Strike answers quietly, eyeing her back with no small dose of trepidation. 

He has a sneaking suspicion this was all very stupid.

Robin sets the paper back down and her hands on the sides of the box, seeming to center herself before she looks back up. “I’ve called off the wedding.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not marrying Matthew.”

“Right.”

For an investigator it’s taken him an embarrassingly long time to realize he hasn’t seen that ring on her finger again since the first night he noticed it was gone. Somehow, after that thought, the very next one is a little pang of shame at having thrown away that boutonniere she’d given him. And next, a wild flash of a thought that she could make him another for his next birthday. And maybe another after. And-

They stare at one another, each at a loss for what to do next, until Robin’s mouth turns up in a grin and then a laugh bubbles out of her, tears following on its heels. She looks down at the box again.

“This is so thoughtful, you . . . you’re-” she takes a steadying breath. “I’m very glad you came in for  _ fuck you _ flowers that day,” she finishes, helplessly laughing and still teary eyed.

Strike can’t help but laugh along, and the sound of them together is strange, wonderful, and bright.

____________________


End file.
